In modern dairy farm industry there are continuous research and development activities in order to improve the efficiency of various activities such as machine milking, which, inter alia, involves increased milk yield and reduced milking time.
A major trend in this respect is an increased degree of automation of the various activities. For instance, machine milking may be performed by milking robots in a completely automated manner. Such an automatic milking system may take care of milking, feeding, milk inspection, milk sampling, animal traffic, etcetera in a large area wherein the dairy animals are walking about freely and are visiting the milking machine voluntarily.
A milking machine involves heavy expenditure and has a limited milk production capacity. Thus, animals having a high milk production should be allowed to be milked more often than animals having a low milk production. The operation and use of a milking machine, which animals are visiting on a voluntary basis, in order to obtain an overall dairy farm performance is an arduous task. An objective is here to safeguard an optimal milk production. Naturally, ethical aspects as well as animal care have to be considered.
EP 0988784 E1 (MAASLAND N. V.) discloses a method of automatically milking animals, which are allowed to visit individually a milking parlor comprising a milking robot and an animal identification system. An animal visiting the milking parlor is milked only if at least a specific number of milkings, Q, of other animals has taken place since the last milking of the relevant animal. The number Q is calculated as Q=cM/x, where x is an individual animal parameter indicating how often the relevant animal has to be milked (a high figure for an animal having a high milk production). M is the total number of milkings performed by the robot, and c is a correction factor (between 0.5 and 1), which corrects for the fact that an animal only visits the robot a limited number of times per time unit.
Alternatively, Q=cmM/x2, where m is the number of recent milkings per unit time of the relevant animal. By this consideration also for how often the relevant animal has been milked recently is made, i.e. Q is corrected by the factor m/x which is higher than 1 if the animal has recently been milked more frequently than her desired value.